Saturday, January 25, 2020

Recall the cooperation between the US and
Iran during the US/Soviet Cold War following WWII.Iran became part of the US Truman Doctrine to
contain Soviet economic and military threats worldwide, which after the collapse
of the SU and 9-11 was widened to
include all so-called terrorist threats world wide.

But the Iran-US alliance crashed in 1953
when President Eisenhower approved CIA plans to overthrow the elected Prime
Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had incurred the wrath of British and US oil
companies by nationalizing Iran’s oil.Once
Mossadegh was deposed, the US became the main ally of the new Shah and his
infamous secret police.In that moment
the US went from friend to foe in the minds of many Iranians which has lasted
to this day.

It was also the CIA’s first successful
covert operation to overthrow a government that refused to obey the US, later
examples being Guatemala’sArbenz,
Congo’s Lumumba, and Cuba.

Eventually, the Shah was overthrown, he
fled to the US, and Iranian citizens then captured the US Embassy in Tehran, and
held 52 US diplomats hostage for 444 days, known as the Hostage Crisis.Every night the US press reminded the public
of the crisis.For example, for 444 days Ted Koppel’s ABC
News America Held Hostage reminded
Americans that Iranians had kidnapped their diplomats.

Other aggressions by the US followed, sometimes
with tit for tat response by Iran, but in the minds of Iranians none equaled the
US/CIA /UK overthrow of Mossadegh.And
all arose as part of the US War to Control the Greater Middle East.

Take the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, begun by
Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians.At first the US declared neutrality . But in
1982, the US secretly provided Iraq with highly classified intelligence,
including on Iranian troop movements, and covertly shipped American weapons to
Iraq.

Hardly remembered today but milestones in the
evolving US War for the Greater Middle East are these events involving the Navy
with US openly pro-Saddam Hussein:

Operation Praying
Mantis, in which the US Navy destroyed the Iranian Navy.“The smallest fighting ship in the US Navy
easily outgunned the largest ship in Iran’s Navy.”And inadvertently the USS Vncennes shot down
an Iran Air 655.For which VP George
H.W. Bush refused to send flowers, saying:“I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the
facts are.”

Iraq bombed the USS Stark, Saddam Hussein blamed Iran,
and immediately accepting the lie in the words of President Ronald Reagan,
declared, “the villain in the piece really is Iran”;

the doubling of US
warships operating in the Persian Gulf itself with one or two carrier battle
groups and another WWII battleship;

the sinking of the
Iran ship Iran Ajr.

These events crossed
an important threshold when the US initiated a distinct military campaign.The official Pentagon explanation was to
protect the oil.But its broader purpose
was to ensure Iraq’s victory in the Iraq-Iran War, the First Gulf War, for this
goal would establish the United States as the region’s ultimate arbiter,
asserting a purpose implicit in the Carter Doctrine, which inaugurated the US
War to Control the Middle East.This was
the unstated mission of the US forces gathering in the Persian Gulf in ever
greater strength during the First Gulf War.

II.Iran’s Many Peaceful
Overtures and US Dismissals

War looms again between
the US and Iran.Can you tell me why?For a hundred reasons we should be
allies.We don’t have time here today to identify all
the reasons.But we can select two moments
of the chronology of Iran/US relations to illustrate their much longer history.

Begin by remembering the September 11,
2001, bombing by airplane hijackers of the NYC Trade Towers and Pentagon in
Washington.

What follows is
clear.But a perversity in the minds of US leaders
makes evidence inconsequential and clarity opaque.

On 9-11-2001, a handful of
middle-easterners-- mainly extremist Wahhabist Sunni, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabians--
blew up the Towers in NYC and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.What?Stop
there.Who were these people?Our leaders soon knew who they were.15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabians, Sunni Saudi Arabians (Sunni the ruling religion
of Saudi Arabia); in addition they were fundamentalist Wahhabist Sunni, AND
they were members of Al Qaeda (that is, followers of bin Laden).The hijackers were extremist Wahhabi- Sunni- Al Qaeda- Saudi Arabians,You
would think such vicious violation of our homeland, such total evil, would have
stopped all mobility by Saudis coming or going in the US, and given the
hysteria of the moment Saudis in the US would have been rounded up and jailed
without a mention of the Bill of Rights.But instead, members of the Saudi elite in the US were permitted
immediate exit to fly home.

The 9/11, 2001 attacks were planned in
Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda’s bin Laden and his followers lived under the
protection of the Taliban.What? The
Taliban are fundamentalist Sunnis same as the Saudis.

What?And the Iranians?Because the
Taliban had harbored al Quada and had murdered Iranian diplomats. for a
half-dozen years Shia Iran had been fighting the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban by
assisting the Afghan Northern Alliance.The US and the Iranians were allies against the Taliban!

And what did Iranians think of the 9/11
attacks?In some Arab nations, people
celebrated the attacks on Israel’s main supporter.But Iranians held candlelight vigils and
their leaders expressed condolences and anticipated a warming of US-Iranian
relations.

Then when the Bush administration invaded
and toppled the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban Afghanistan and pushed Al Qaeda mainly
into Pakistan, the Iranians offered to help the US rebuild the country.Specifically , not only did they help to
arrange a meeting of all sides in Bonn, Germany to create an interim
government, their representative Javad Zarif was essential to gaining agreement
with the Northern Alliance.The US
special envoy to Afghanistan James Dobbins praised tIran’s constructive
collaboration with the US.We here today
might include Iranian Mr. Zarif as a world peace leader.

At the international donors’ conference to
help rebuild Afghanistan, Iran aplayed a positive role, pledging a staggering
$500 million in assistance—the same amount as the US.Iran even offered to pay to rebuild the
Afghan Army, which the US refused.And
Iran helped extradite Al Qaeda fighters who had fled Afghanistan and were
living in Iran.

How did the US reward this collaboration?

In
his January 29, 2002 ,State of the Union address, President Bush called Iran
part of the “axis of evil.”Bush’s
speech undercut particularly any positive relations with Iranian reformists who
had lobbied to engage the US, and it strengthened the hand of Iranian
hard-liner war makers.

One might have expected Iran to shift into
war mode after that threatening speech,
but it did not.

Three months after the invasion of Iraq,
the UK, Germany, and France sought a conference with Iran over its nuclear
policy.The US refused to join the
talks.But the Bush administration
“didn’t talk to evil.”

Iran signed the Tehran Declaration with
the other three nations anyway agreeing to fully cooperate with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to suspend all uranium enrichment.

Now Remember Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s
brutal persecution of its Shia minority population and Saddam Hussein’s brutal invasion
of Iran in 1980 and the ensuing horrific 8-years war between Iraq and
Iran.So when Bush II invaded Iraq, Iran
sought a “grand bargain “with the US, a bold peace treaty offering to negotiate
nearly every issue the US had been concerned with—Iran’s nuclear program, its
support for Palestinian militant groups, its policy in Iraq, and accepting
Israel’s right to exist.In return, the
US would have to give up hostile behavior toward Iraq, end economic sanctions, and
allow access to peaceful nuclear power.

By now you can guess the US reply?Iran’s grand offer never even received a
reply.The blowback of that refusal hurt
US chances of controlling Iraq, and it convinced Iranian hardliners that armed
force was the only effective way to treat the US.

This period marked a historic change in
Iran’s Iraq policy.It’s when Iran began
funding, training, and equipping Shia militias inside lraq.

When by 2005 and US occupation of Iraq was
a disaster, the Bush administration finally decided to engage Iran
diplomatically.But despite Iran having
already suspended uranium enrichment, the White House demanded that Iran give
up fuel production altogether, stopping its nuclear power program.Now Iran refused.

And it was at this time the government of
Iran turned rightward.Conservative
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated reformist Hashemi Rafsanjani as President of
Iran.The reformists had repeatedly
tried to build a positive relationship with the US, but the US had shut the
door to them.With Ahmadinejad Iran’s hardliners
surged into power.Andlmost immediately Iran restarted its
suspended nuclear program.

In summary, US clenched fist rejection of
living and working with Iran defeated peace in the Middle East.

The Bush hardliners had destroyed US
ability to build a consensus for cooperation with Iran.It would take the election of Barack Obama
for that to be achieved.

Another powerful influence not yet
mentioned, that helps to explain the otherwise massively irrational behavior by
the US, is Israel.Many post-9-11
opportunities to improve US-Iranian relations were torpedoed at least partly by
pro-Israeli/Zionist partisans, beginning with US reluctance to accept Iran’s
help vs. Taliban.

Conclusion on the Falsification
of language by US Imperial Aggressors and the Failure of Memory by the American
people.

I’ll paraphrase
Andrew Bacevich’s ethical conclusion to his chapter 6 on the US undeclared war against
Iran that began with the killing of US sailors in USS Stark by Iraq and killing
of Iranian civilians in Iran Air 655.“In using terms like accident or tragedy to
describe the deaths suffered by the Stark and inflicted by theVincennes,I U.S. civilian and military
officials at the time had sought to drain each event of moral or political
significance” Yet these killings impart a stain the passage of time has not
eradicated.“US
military participation in this first of several Gulf Wars began [in] cynicism
and betrayal.It ended with an atrocity.”With the onset of the several future Gulf
Wars, “Americans simply chose to forget their involvement in the first.”

References to Dick’s Talk 1-25-20

Bacevich, Andrew J.America’s War For the Greater Middle East: A
Military History.Random House,
2016.(The US war to control greater
middle-eastern oil “has become a monumental march to folly.”My main source for Part II.)

Benjamin, Medea.Inside
Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.OR Books, 2018.(My main source in Part I.)

Matter
of Fact, Channel 7, Sunday, December 12, 2020, 5:50.Summary about 5 minutes of US/Iran
aggressions against each other, mainly initiated by the US.

Parsi, Trita.Losing an Enemy and A Single Role of the Dice.(Apparently
Benjamin’s chief source for her analysis of Iran/US pp. 154ff.)

Rashid, Ahmed.Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the
Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.Penguin, 2008.(I was not writing a scholarly paper in which
I would weigh various versions of historical events; rather, I read Rashid and
Bacevich to assess my elaboration on the events and my general conclusions, but
I used only Bacevich directly.)

Monday, January 20, 2020

The future foretold in
2012 and discussed at the August 2013 OMNI Climate Book Forum was a summary of what was
well-known by scientists.

--*Guzman, Overheated.2012.Summary of what might happen to humans if
average temp rises 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.The OMNI Forum August 2013 on Guzman was led
by Chad Pollock. [The preceding copied
from my annotated climate books bibliography.]That is, we have known basically, i.e., sufficiently, what we know today
about the catastrophe of higher temperature at least since 2012, but even then
the facts were already well-published.On the crucial cap of 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial level here’s a tiny sample of the books that reported the
facts: Ward (2007, 2010 rev. B. Fitzpatrick), Lynas (2008),Dumanoski (2009, rev. Neath 2012), Monbiot (2009), Dyer (2010), Hertsgaard (2011),
Guzman (2012).The members of this Forum
have known the truth of the rapidly approaching planetary catastrophe for 13
years, and our leaders could have, should have known also if they had sought
the truth.--Dick

Frazier provides a succinct summation of facts
of recent warming and how scientists and journalists are responding 2019.Part I.The facts, reality.E.g., “current warming is unprecedented over
the past 2,000 years.”
Disclosures by the NOAA’s State of the
Climate (2019). “All in all, the
first seven months of 2019…much-warmer-than-average conditions across much of
the world’s land and ocean surfaces.”
Part II.Alaska and Iceland rapid
warming, our canary in the coal mine for climate warming.
E.g., “Iceland is preparing for a world without ice.”
III.Three new studies show uniqueness
of our unparalleled, unprecedented anthropogenic, simultaneous, global epoch
(while discovering degrees and variations of change).
IV.Science journalists have reported
the science, refuted the climate naysayers., and analyzed human behavior when
confronted by dire facts (fear, evasion).
Frazier is editor of SI and “has
reported on climate and weather research for decades when Earth Sciences editor and then editor of Science News.The same no. of SI includes a
rev. of the book Pseudoscience: The
Conspiracy against Science Guide, ed. Kaufman and Kaufman.--Dick

Temperatures
reached
record highs in the last decade, hovering around 1.1 degrees Celsius above the
pre-industrial period average and approaching levels scientists say would
prompt significant, damaging change, the World
Meteorological Organization says. The world's oceans have also increased
notably in temperature and acidity, the WMO reports.

The
United Nations Environment Programme just issued a shocking warning: if we
continue at our current pace, the Earth will warm 3.2 degrees Celsius
by 2100. That would render huge parts of the planet uninhabitable,
force millions to become climate refugees, endanger vital resources for even
more, and lead to catastrophic natural disasters.

78%
of ALL emissions come from G20 countries. If we wanted to meet the UN’s
requirements, we could. But Trump shredding the Paris Climate Agreement has set
us back, and allowed countries like China to brush off emissions. Every year
that we don’t take big action makes it harder and harder to catch up in the
future.

The
eyes of all future generations are upon us. We must meet this crisis with the
urgency it demands; the tools to do so are here for us to use, all we need is
the courage to act.

Editorial Reviews. Review. "The
toughest book yet on global warming and its perpetrators. ... The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink
(Counterpunch) by [St. Clair ... Environmental journalists Jeffrey St. Clair
and Joshua Frank take you on a sobering ...

The global community
is doing "stunningly little" to reduce carbon emissions and a
worldwide revolution is needed if there is to be any hope of limiting global
warming to 1.5 degrees as set out in the Paris climate deal, says United
Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston.
"We will be extremely lucky if we get close to a rise of 2 degrees and
the prospects are rising every day that we will be up 3 to 4 degrees,"
Alston warns.

In the late 1990s, three
scientists published a paper charting the Earth’s temperatures over the last
millennium. For the first 900
years, the trend line was the definition of boring: just little blips up and
down. That changed around 1900, when the mean global temperature shot up, and
kept rising.

That now-famous trend
line, dubbed “the hockey stick” because of its sharp upward slope, is so vivid
that it has played a key role in two decades of argument over whether the
Earth’s atmosphere is warming, and whether those changes are caused by
heat-trapping gases generated by human activities.

It’s not hard to pick
apart a single study’s data. Critics of the hockey stick pointed to
centuries-long temperature shifts such as the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the
Little Ice Age to argue that anomalies in the 20th century were also
short-term, natural shifts. Critics also noted the patchwork nature of the
pre-1900 data, which didn’t rely on direct measurements, and said there was no
direct evidence that increased greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of
fossil fuels was causing the current temperature rise.

Uncertainty is central
to the enterprise of science. It’s a rare day when a single study — or dozens,
or hundreds — answers a question without a doubt. And because uncertainty
almost always remains, scientists have to explain both quantitatively and
qualitatively how uncertain they are. That’s good science. But climate change
naysayers used that uncertainty to say, “The scientists aren’t sure.” And it
meant that when we journalists reported accurately on the science by noting
uncertainty, we gave more ammunition to doubters.

In this issue, we report
on how the city of Boston is
regularly flooding due to rising sea levels. Freelancer Mary Caperton Morton explains how
policy makers and scientists are racing to develop responses to keep the
venerable city functioning as the water moves inland. And earth and climate
writer Carolyn Gramling reports on a startling new study that lays to rest the
argument that the warming we’re experiencing is just another normal climate
shift. This one is clearly different, the data show: Those earlier temperature
fluctuations were regional; what’s happening
now is worldwide.

Michael Mann, a climate
scientist at Penn State who is one of the researchers who developed the hockey
stick data chart, said back in 2005 that he thought that people wouldn’t take
climate change seriously until they saw it in their own backyards. People in Boston think they’re seeing it, as
do people in many other communities around the world who are bracing for more
extreme heat, rainfall, drought and storms. Our charge at Science News is
to continue to report on the science while chronicling humankind’s responses,
for good or ill.

CO2 was
identified as a prime driver of global warming in the 1950s and has been the
subject of many international meetings over the past 30 years. Despite
increasing calls to reduce carbon emissions, they continue to rise faster and
faster.

The
street thermometer in front of the EU Commission headquarters shows a
temperature of 46° Celsius (114° F), on July 25 in Brussels, as a new heatwave
hits the Belgium capital. Thierry Monasse / Getty Images

The
latest heat
wave that crippled
Paris with 109 degree Fahrenheit heat and saw the mercury hit 104 degrees
Fahrenheit in the Netherlands and Belgium was caused by humans, according to
a new study published on Friday, as the Associated Press reported.

It is very hot.
According to the satellites, last month was the hottest June ever recorded.
France just saw 115 degrees Fahrenheit; Anchorage, Alaska, which had never
topped 85 degrees, hit 90 last week. And it's very wet — Washington, D.C. just
suffered 'historic' flooding, and as I write this today it's the French Quarter
of New Orleans that's underwater, after the wettest 12 months in American
history.

What we have long
feared is playing out, faster and more brutally even than most scientists
imagined. But politics is hot
too. One candidate after another has embraced the Green New Deal.Working alongside many allies, we’ve been
pushing for it as hard as we know how — because it’s the first legislation on
the same scale as the crisis it tries to solve.

Around the world, we
got a wonderful shot in the arm a few weeks ago when our partners and
colleagues at 350 Africa announced that plans for a massive Kenyan coal-fired
power plant had been beaten, a breakthrough victory for an entire continent.

Across Europe in June,
heat records shattered. In years to come, researchers say, many more heat waves
are likely to batter the Continent.

Rhoda Feng.“Outdoor Workers In Every Florida County
Endangered by Heat.”Public Citizen News (Nov./Dec. 2018), 7.“…the problem is rapidly getting worse due
to global warming.”PC and partners are
calling on OSHA to issue heat standards to protect workers.

The
International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very
important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is
that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are
Southern Asia and Western Africa.Source

HEAT INDEX

From Bill McKibben, Falter

P. 39 on heat—“heat
alone, the most obvious effect of climate change.”Nine of the deadliest heat waves in human
history have happened since 2000.”In
2016 temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran “peaked at slightly above 129
degrees F.”But it was dry heat.Simultaneously at the Persian Gulf and the
Gulf of Oman, the high humidity produced a heat indexover 140 degrees F.

What is
survivable?When temperatures pass 95
degrees F. and the humidity is above 90%, humans can survive only “for a few
hours.”Unfortunately, 1.5 billion
people, a fifth of humanity, including Iran, lives in an area of such
temperatures, and the planet is warming.

A note on the politics of warming.I am writing this June 22, 2018, when the US
is threatening Iran with ruin both by economic and military violence.“In 2015, in the Bandar-e Mahshahr in Iran,
the heat index reached 165 degrees,
the highest ever witnessed on the planet.”But this evokes no compassion on the part of US leaders and many of the
populace, who seek 1% America First domination of the planet through control
and use of the fossil fuels that caused the heat, and not the well-being of the
human or other species.--Dick

Heat IndexGoogle Search
6-30-19

Noun: a measure indicating the level of
discomfort the average person is thought to experience as a result of the
combined effects of the temperature and humidity of the air.